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Factual errors: The closing credits end with "Dedicated to: J.T. Walsh 1943-1997". However, J.T. Walsh died in 1998.See more »

Quotes:

[first lines] [David is gazing admiringly at a pretty blonde girl] David:*Hi* [chuckles] David:I mean, Hi. Uh, look, you probably don't think I should be asking you this. I mean, not knowing you well and all? I mean, you know, I, I, I know you, 'cause everybody knows you. I just don't know you technically. Uh, anyhow. Uh, I don't know what you're doing this weekend, but my mom's leaving town, and she's letting me borrow the car. [the camera pulls back to show that the girl is standing several dozen feet away and, in fact, is smiling and looking at another boy] [...] See more »

The basic theme here being that the meaningful life requires breaking out of
rigid, dull and conventional roles, this film's story sucks two teens back
through their television set to a fictitious 1950s sitcom named
"Pleasantville," where life is in gray-tones until they start breaking the
rules. The self-referential notion of having characters interact with the
very media which represents them has its counterpart as far back as 1924
with Buster Keaton in "Sherlock Jr.," in 1970 with a low-budget film named
"The Projectionist," and in 1985 with Woody Allen's "The Purple Rose of
Cairo." But where the others explore the private experience of
self-discovery through their enmeshment with the media, this one explores a
much wider public awareness. In that sense it is a very cleaver and
intelligent story, offering numerous social messages worthy of
consideration.

On the downside, its message that "different" is better mostly translates
into "contrary" means better, providing an "anything goes" mentality in
answer to conventional values. The rules are to be broken by gratuitous
sex, loud music, and cheap garish art. Not "transcending" in answer to
different, but rather setting up what is conventional today as more
desirable than what was conventional back then. Exchanging one convention
for another is not for that reason an improvement, and the attempt to do so
results in a self-congratulatory narcissism of the form: See how much more
urbane and sophisticated we are than our parents were? The 1950s are set up
as a straw-man, while the values of the 1990s are simply taken for granted
as superior. Hence the deeper questions of change, growth and improvement,
are never asked, and what we are given merely puts the past down without
bringing up the present.

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